The latest is a viral video called “Plandemic,” a 25-minute clip propagating the wild claims of long-ago discredited researcher Judy Mikovits, whose rise and fall was chronicled in a Chicago Tribune investigation a decade ago.

Advertisement

“Plandemic” — which has been trending on Twitter — includes common themes of a federal government cover-up, profiteering over the virus and persecution of people attempting to expose “the truth.” While YouTube and other social media platforms have been trying to remove the video for violating their guidelines, the clip has been widely recirculated.

Here are four things to know about the controversial career of Mikovits, the scientist featured in “Plandemic”:

Advertisement

1.Her research on an illness called chronic fatigue syndrome was discredited years ago.

In 2009, a team of scientists led by Mikovits published a paper in the journal Science that tied chronic fatigue syndrome to a retrovirus called XMRV, offering potential hope for future treatment to patients. Mikovits also, without evidence, began linking XMRV to autism and other disorders, the Tribune reported.

But other scientists couldn’t replicate the results of her study, and growing evidence indicated the findings were caused by lab contamination.

Mikovits stood by her findings and decried other scientists who couldn’t confirm her work. “Some are not trying in completely good faith,” she told the Tribune at the time.

2.The paper was retracted and Mikovits was fired.

Another study published by her employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Nevada, could find no evidence of XMRV in the blood of chronic fatigue syndrome patients. The institute terminated Mikovits in 2011; Science retracted her paper shortly after.

3.The debacle led to legal troubles for Mikovits.

Breaking News Newsletter

As it happens

Get updates on the coronavirus pandemic and other news as it happens with our breaking email alerts

She was arrested and briefly jailed in 2011, charged in Nevada with two felonies stemming from accusations that she wrongfully stole lab notebooks, a computer and proprietary data from her former employer. The charges were dropped in 2012.

4. She’s also been in the news for anti-vaccine activism.

Mikovits has also claimed government cover-ups on the purported dangers of immunizations. In July, she spoke out against proposed legislation limiting vaccine exemptions in California, linking various diseases to what she called unsafe vaccines.

"This whole program is destroying the whole health of this country, and we don’t get it,” she said, according to the Ventura County Star in California.